Kim Jong-un outlines strategic priorities for North Korea

First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of North Korea Kim Jong-un came out with two speeches at the party’s plenary session

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PYONGYANG, March 31 (Itar-Tass) – First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of North Korea Kim Jong-un came out with two speeches at the party’s plenary session here on Sunday.

The session focused “on tasks the party faces in making a decisive turn in the process of accomplishing the Juche revolutionary course.”

The party’s strategic priorities will embrace “reconstruction of the economy as well as a qualitative and numeric strengthening of nuclear delivery forces for self-defence purposes,” the North Korean leader said at the session after visiting the mausoleums of his father Kim Jong-il and grandfather Kim Il-sun in Kumsusun Palace. He was accompanied by members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and of the Central National Defence Commission.

North Korea “is not eager to use the nuclear weapons as goods for buying American dollars or as a bargaining tool for receiving humanitarian aid,” he said.

“We can disrupt all the attempts of the United States to annex the Korean Peninsula only if we possess nuclear weapons” and have in mind the aim of “protecting our ideology, social system and all the socialist achievements, even the right of the nation to exist,” said Kim Jong-un, who is also the first chairman of North Korea’s State Defence Committee.

He paid special attention to “the maximum possible development of leading branches of the economy,” including the consumer goods industry and agriculture, as a very important step in raising the population's living standards.

Kim Jong-un stressed the essential character of “developing the nuclear industry that relies upon the country’s own resources.”

The North Korean leader outlined development of space technologies as one more priority. “We need to launch the most upgraded satellites including communication ones,” he said.

As a result of the outlined strategic course of the Workers’ Party, North Korea will become “a great political, military and socialist-orientated economic power, a highly civilized country,” he said. He promised to his fellow party members that the DPRK “as a responsible state having nuclear weapons in its possession will take every possible effort towards nuclear non-proliferation, towards maintaining peace and security in Asia and the whole world and will participate in the process of global denuclearization.”

In addition to the course of the party, the plenary session focused on organizational issues and made changes in the membership of the Politburo Presidium.

The situation on the Korean Peninsula escalated after North Korea’s satellite launch last December and its third nuclear test in February.

In response to these moves the UN Security Council adopted two resolutions expanding sanctions against Pyongyang. North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said it would not recognize these “criminal” documents approved under the pressure of the United States as depriving North Korea of its right to self-defence and civilian space exploration.

Pyongyang reacted sharply after two strategic bombers B-2 of the U.S. Air Force hit training targets on South Korea’s firing range on March 28 within the framework of the ongoing training series Fowl Eagle that started on March 1 and will last until April 30.